The Cult of Grit Is Making Us Miserable

Few traits are celebrated today as much as persistence.

We demand it of ourselves as we grind toward the mythical 10,000 hours of mastery. We demand it of our children as they sit through years of standardized schooling that promise career paths their neighbors will envy. We praise athletes for “toughing it out" and entrepreneurs for “grinding harder" while we pat ourselves on the back when we “stick with the plan.”

Much of the time, persistence is every bit as valuable as we believe. Without it, the best ideas remain idle daydreams. Angela Duckworth’s definition of grit as passion and commitment to long-term goals is indeed a bona fide predictor of success.

But what if it is also the very thing that hollows us out?

Somewhere along the way, Duckworth's hopeful message of persistence was turned into the popular cult of grit. We see signs of this cult in action everywhere around us. Silicon Valley’s relentless grindset, China’s punishing 9-9-6 work culture, Wall Street’s devotion to all-nighters, and the seasonal sales spikes of Adderall when exam season comes along all stem from the same source.

Those who burn the candle at both ends believe they’re living twice as much as everyone else, and yet, blind grit is closer to kryptonite for a fulfilling life.

When deployed carelessly, grit traps us in sunk costs and keeps us marching to someone else’s rules, tricking us into mistaking sheer endurance for meaning.

If we want to thrive instead of simply strive, we need to rethink what deserves our grit, and the journey begins by learning to shed the stigma we attach to quitting.

Giving up is not failure

Although pop culture repeats the mantra that “Winners never quit, and quitters never win,” reality would beg to differ.

In The Voltage Effect, John A. List of the University of Chicago introduces the idea of "optimal quitting." His point is that sometimes quitting a path that no longer scales or satisfies us allows us to reallocate our energy toward more promising directions, rather than stubbornly staying the course because of sunk costs.

History is full of celebrated figures who walked away exactly in this fashion. Michael Lewis left bond trading to write. Vera Wang abandoned figure skating to reinvent herself as a fashion icon. Even Jeff Bezos quit a lucrative Wall Street career to start an online bookstore that his peers ridiculed. Imagine our society if they had all stuck around for another 5,000 hours to climb Mount Mastery.

One of the great misconceptions that fuels our instinctive aversion to quitting is that it erases what came before.

Behavioral economists call this the “sunk cost fallacy,” defined as the sense that if we leave, we forfeit everything already invested. But the evidence points elsewhere. Expertise rarely vanishes; it compounds. Studies show that skills gained in one domain enhance performance in others by widening our perspective and deepening pattern recognition (Schoenfeld et al., 2023).

Quitting isn't failing; it's fuel for exploration. And exploration isn’t weakness; it’s optimization.

Want fulfillment? Start exploring

The antidote to the cult of grit is as simple as moving from chasing success to tracking down fulfillment.

The longest-running study on happiness, the Harvard Study of Adult Development (run by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz), concluded that the single strongest predictor of a good life was not wealth, perseverance, or mastery of a domain, but quality relationships.

Grit can reliably get us to the corner office, but it will not guarantee we enjoy the view once we get there. Bronnie Ware, the palliative care nurse who recorded the “five regrets of the dying,” found the most common regret was not having lived life on one’s own terms. At the end of the line, doing things “the gritty way” matters less than doing things your way.

The reason why the cult of grit hollows us out is that it pressures us to commit early, often much too early for the choice to be truly ours, and then discourages deviation because changing paths feels like betraying years of effort. For the lucky few who chose perfectly at 16, this rigidity may serve them well. For the rest of us, it is a recipe for a life we'll end up regretting.

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This isn’t an argument for abandoning persistence altogether. Grit matters, and more importantly, it delivers, but we need to be careful that we remain in charge instead of grit taking over entirely.

Instead of worshipping endurance, we should normalize the courage to quit. Just as persistence builds strength, letting go builds wisdom. Both are essential to living well.

Psychologists studying motivation remind us that not all goals are created equal. Transactional goals, like titles and accomplishments, are transitory and wear their effect out once achieved. Identity-level goals, by contrast, tie effort to who we want to become, acting as a much stronger catalyst (e.g., Nurra & Oyserman, 2018).

The identities we aspire to serve as goal models, acting less like a finish line and more like a compass that steadies us when life veers off course. If your vision of a future self is more fulfilled, more curious, or more connected, then stepping off your current track may be the wisest choice you can make.

Exploration is what keeps that compass pointing true north, and curiosity keeps us open to opportunities before grit locks us in. When we align our grit with identity-level goals and inspired role models, quitting stops looking like surrender. Instead, it becomes an act of optimization, making room for a life we’ll be proud to have lived.